Justin Bieber now starting transatlantic rip-off wars

UPDATE: I am pleased to tell you that Gawker has now decided my argument "is convincing", and "hereby renounce the suggestion that she fuck herself". This transatlantic Bieber humour war was resolved without loss of life – a situation I know would make Justin happy. Along with turkey sandwiches and the colour blue, peace is one of this favourite things.

Morning kids. Lost in Showbiz is touched to find itself the subject of a Gawker post entitled: "Hey look a Guardian columnist stole our jokes", wherein Gawker blogger Adrian Chen suggests I stole three jokes of his from a piece he wrote about Justin Bieber and recycled them in my own piece about Justin Bieber.

Because Adrian is probably sleeping in another time zone right now, and Gawker don't seem to allow just anyone to comment on their site, I reproduce my email response to him below in the hope that it will offer a sort of behind-the-non-music look at how I came to write the offending item.

"Hello Adrian - I have just read your post and I can well see why you think there was a similarity, though I am afraid it is genuinely a coincidence. I know this primarily because I honestly did not read your blog post. I promise you. I can obviously see why you would think it similar in the three instances you have picked out, but the only similar piece I read was a Popeater post entitled "Dummies Guide to Justin Bieber - what's the fuss?". But let me address your points one by one.

I agree the headline is extremely similar but because I work for a newspaper and this is the way we still do it, I don't write the headlines on anything I write, ever. A subeditor does. That was dreamed up by someone completely different after my piece had been filed to them. If you'd like I can get you their name today and you can check it with them.

As for the point about Susan Boyle, my original copy read "Put briefly, Justin's story is this: he is Canadian, comes from good Christian stock, and he's the first genuine YouTube sensation to cross over into mainstream pop stardom." When I had written it, someone said to me "but what about Susan Boyle?", and I realised not mentioning her would undermine the point, so I added the quickest line I could think of to clarify. I agree it makes the same point as you, but frankly there are only two really successful mainstream YouTube crossovers that I know of, and one of them is Justin Bieber and one is Susan Boyle (who as I say I'd forgotten about, but obviously isn't a popstar). I think the joke was really, really obvious, but coming under the headline "an old person's guide" that the editor chose for my piece, it creates an impression of ripping you off that is misleading.

The point about Justin Bieber always trending on Twitter would be a luminously obvious one to make to anyone writing a piece about who he is - his name is up there twice among the trending topics every single time you visit the Twitter front page. Gazillions of people will have noticed this. The joke about half of Twitterers asking "who is Justin Bieber" came simply becausee very time I write about someone whom a certain section of Guardian readers would regard as culturally infra dig, there will be people who respond by posting "who is [whoever]?" beneath the column to make their sniffy point (and you are very welcome to trawl through my back catalogue to verify this). I knew they would do it more than ever on the Justin Bieber front, so I was looking for a way to head that off and came up with this. That was why I did the "your ignorance only makes him stronger" stuff. And the reason I thought of this was because in the Popeater piece I read, they quoted a Conan O'Brien tweet which said "I just learnt that retweets of my Bieber tweet mentioning Bieber actually help Bieber. Bieber, you're a worthy foe. Bieber."

Finally, the point about being arrested for not tweeting. I hate to break it to you but you are WAY from the the first one to think of that. I remember reading about the mall incident in November, when it happened, in a variety of places. The Huffington Post's headline, among very many others, was Man Arrested For Not Tweeting. The point was made endlessly. I see you said it was a "scary new world" - the reason I said "this is Justin's world now" was a very lame (on my part) skew on the old "It's Frank's world - we're just living in it". I'm afraid I frequently rehash that old Sinatra line in copy.

In the end, your post appeared before mine and in my view is much funnier than what I wrote. In fact, the bits I found far funnier were the many things I didn't think of, and were I in the business of nicking jokes I would have taken other ones entirely. So I can also see how you might think I had ripped you off, but I can honestly tell you I didn't, and I hope the above points have gone some way to convincing you of that. If they haven't, feel free to call me and I will gladly continue to try do so.

I think it might have been reasonable to ask me to respond before you posted inviting me to fuck myself, but perhaps you might now consider appending my response to your original post?

I look forward to hearing from you.

Marina"

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